Mary Daly (1928- )

Throughout this article, many "Daly-isms" will appear,
such as, "A.F./B.E." meaning "Anno Feminarum/Biophilic Era." The intent behind
their use is to give the reader a taste of Daly’s writing style, for truly the
medium is intimately bound up with the message. Though some terms will appear as
neologisms, the wordplay is generally straightforward in its symbolic portent.
The import of the novel use of language will become apparent.

Hag-iographical/Crone-ological Sketch

Little information is available concerning Mary Daly's
early life. In some sense, such data would prove helpful for the reconstruction
of the conditions and contexts which influenced the development of this singular
feminist post-christian philosopher-Crone. Daly was born in 1928, however, the
figure with whom we are principally concerned was born in the tumult of the
sixties and early seventies. The Mary Daly which preceded her appears to be a
somewhat distant, though sympathetic, relative of the present Spinster, a view
supported by the latter Daly's own autobiographical commentaries upon her
development and work. Therefore, this hag-iography focuses on those events
singled out by Daly as transformative.

The early Sixties brought Daly to Europe, a move spurred
by both the early rumblings of feminist furor and academic ambition.

My passion had been to study
philosophy and theology. To a person who had grown up in the Catholic ghetto,
theology meant "Catholic" theology. There was no place in the United States
where a female was allowed to study for the "highest degree" in this field, the
"canonical" Doctorate in Sacred Theology. Since I would settle for nothing less
than the "highest degrees," I applied to study in Fribourg, where the
theological faculty was state-controlled and therefore could not legally exclude
women (Daly 1985[1968], 8).

Daly describes her time at Fribourg as both fruitful and
frustrating. There she acquired doctoral degrees in both philosophy and
(Catholic) theology, and underwent great personal and intellectual growth. On
the one hand, Fribourg was isolating. Daly was one of a few women at the
university, and felt distinctly out of place among her male seminary classmates,
many of whom shunned her as a potential source of temptation. Further, she had
begun to question the very merits of her chosen field of study; the bonds of her
Catholic faith began to chafe. On the other hand, she revelled in the freedom
that Fribourg and the Continent provided. She cherished the intensity of the
academic environment as well as the free exchange of ideas among friends beyond
the stricture of the classroom (cf. Daly 1985[1968], 7-9).

While at Fribourg, Daly had the opportunity to visit Rome
during the Second Vatican Council. Vatican II played a decisive role in Daly's
intellectual and spiritual development. Initially, the Council was a chief
inspiration for her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968), in
which Daly undertakes a historical and philosophical critique of the patriarchal
and gynocidal structures of destruction which inhere in the Church. Though harsh
in her criticism of the Church for its historical and contemporary violence
against women's minds, bodies and spirits, Daly still held some (slim) hope for
a radical transformation and a realization of an egalitarian ecclesia.

This hope was not to last long. Vatican II also sowed
seeds of deep discontent and anger, seeds which were to bear radical fruit in
the coming years. In her "Autobiographical Preface to the 1975 Edition" of
The Church and the Second Sex, Daly describes the peculiarity and perversion
of the Council's spectacle.

The contrast between the arrogant
bearing and colorful attire of the "princes of the church" and the humble,
self-deprecating manner and somber clothing of the very few women was appalling.
Watching the veiled nuns shuffle to the altar rail to receive Holy Communion
from the hands of a priest was like observing a string of lowly ants at some
bizarre picnic. (In retrospect it seems to have been an ant-poisonous picnic)
(Daly 1985[1968], 10).

These images of pompous priests, parading in their
ceremonial drag of colorful dresses to justify their robbery of women's
spiritual energy, and the dour subjugated women would prove emblematic in Daly's
thought. It revealed the reversal and perversion present in the church, and its
inherently vampiric and enslaving tendencies, which drain the life and spirit
from women while mutilating their bodies and psyches.

In 1966 Daly returned to the United States and took a
teaching position at Boston College (B.C.) where she completed The Church and
The Second Sex. As she states, soon after finishing the book, the book
nearly finished her (Daly 1985 [1968], 11). Boston College gave Daly a terminal
contract shortly after the book's publication. Her termination became a cause
celebre and prompted a number of protests at the college and across the
country. Amid the uproar, Daly expected that her academic career would soon come
to an end. In a surprising reversal, however, during the summer of 1969 she was
informed that she had been granted tenure and would return to B.C. in the fall.
The tenure dispute and the attendant trials marked a second watershed in Daly's
development as a "post-christian feminist." Ironically, just as The Church
and the Second Sex was receiving widespread attention, its author, in a
sense, had already passed away. In reflecting upon her early work, Daly sees it
as the vain struggle of a well intentioned but still naive "foresister." The
author of that book was a member of the (oxymoronic and hopefully soon extinct)
species called "Catholic (or Christian) Feminist." Confrontation with both
sacred and secular authorities confirmed for Daly that women could not remain
part of the Church, nor full members in the broader patriarchal society. To do
so would be to subject oneself to ongoing degradation and vampirism. It meant
giving up one's own vital and intellectual energies to the service of a
necrophilic and androcentric master/monster.

The confrontation of the late sixties would prove
paradigmatic of Daly's tenure at B.C., and indeed of her relationship with
academia (or, in her phrase, "academentia") at large. In the years since, there
have been frequent confrontations between Daly and the administrative powers and
principalities of both B.C. and larger academic organizations such as the
American Academy of Religions. In 1975, Daly was initially denied promotion to
full professor, on the grounds her two books to date had been unscholarly and
her academic work less than brilliant. Again, there were national protests, and
B.C. eventually granted her promotion (cf. Daly 1978[1990], xiii ff.). Often,
conflict has revolved around Daly's insistence upon a biophilic and gynocentric
atmosphere and audience. To this end, she has earnestly sought to exclude men
from both her classrooms and "public" lectures. Most recently, B.C.'s refusal to
accept this exclusionary policy has led Daly to take an indefinite leave of
absence from formal teaching.

We may therefore suggest, in keeping with Daly's own
autobiographical comments, that this first public confrontation with patriarchal
authority marked the birth of a new consciousness, a new Mary Daly. She gave up
the futile project of criticizing and seeking reform of a fundamentally corrupt
and corrosive institution. Her attention turned instead to the Spinning of new
tales, new ideas. This act of New Being began in earnest with the 1973
publication of Beyond God the Father. The book marks the first major step
in the revelation and the dis-covery of a philosophy of women's liberation. It
rejects outright Christian and other patriarchal modes of apprehension and
reasoning, and begins to set forward a gynocentric vision of life and the world.
This Spinning of new words/new worlds continues in evolution/revolution in later
works, including the republished version of The Church and the Second Sex
(1975), Gyn/Ecology (1978), Pure Lust (1984), Websters' First
New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language (with Jane Caputi,
1987), Outercourse (1992), Quintessence (1998), and the recent
Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big (2006).

These works comprise not a feminist canon, but rather
represent interrelated and inter-penetrating points in a process of meaning- and
life-building carried on at the margins of patriarchal society. They are the
many turnings of an intellectual and spiritual loom which spins out on the
margins of patriarchal and necrophilic society the vision of a new biophilic
reality. It is both a critical and constructive process. On the one hand, Daly
seeks to analyze the gynocidal currents which are inherent to patriarchy, to
cast light on the systematic murder and rape of women in all reaches of society,
whether this degradation be physical, emotional, mental or spiritual. This is
the ongoing process of Naming, wherein patriarchal structures are called what
they are, their corrosive forces revealed. On the other hand, Daly seeks to set
forth a vision of an alternate reality in which the inherent wholeness, dignity
and power of women is realized, in which women's history is spoken and made, in
which women may at last engage in true being. This is the process of Spinning,
the creation of not only texts, but a new fabric of reality.

Naming the Sins of the Fathers

A principal agenda of Daly's philosophical project is to
reveal the structures and myths within patriarchy which degrade all, but
especially women's, humanity. This critical work began in The Church and the
Second Sex, where Daly reviews the historical record of Christian theory and
practice to show its inherent misogyny. Drawing on the work of Simone be
Beauvoir, Daly notes that Christianity, since its inception, has sought to
oppress and deceive women. It holds up unattainable visions of the Virgin Mary
as the exemplar of the good Christian woman, while also affirming that Mary was
made pure only through the act of a male god and only for the sake of a male
savior. The paradigmatic woman is passive, asexual, and, in a striking reversal
of the normal order, kneels in submission before her son. The model of Christian
piety is essentially one of submission and of patient suffering in light of
oppression. Women achieve some merit only by accepting and internalizing their
role as the patient sufferer who will be rewarded in the life to come, or by
somehow "rising above" the handicap of their sex and embodying more fully the
masculine norm of spiritual rigor, as was the case with Teresa of Avila (cf.
Daly 1985[1968], 66-69).

Christianity is not alone in its degradation of women. In
Gyn/Ecology, Daly surveys the world’s cultures and religions and
demonstrates all participate in perpetuating patriarchal myths, ethics and
aesthetics which form a vampiric network. Where Christianity associates women
with sin through the myth of the Fall and offers the unattainable exemplar of
the virgin mother, the Indian culture and religion promotes the "ultimate
consummation of marriage" in the suttee, the Chinese have practiced
footbinding and the exclusion of women from ancestral rites, and the genital
mutilation of women continues presently in Africa. Even the so-called secular
sciences habitually dismember women, both physically through so-called
"gynecology" and psychically through the fundamentally misogynistic practices of
psychology and psychotherapy.

Women are not the only victims of patriarchy. Daly sees
racism, militarism, nationalism and environmental degradation as manifestations
of the processes of rape and vivisection which characterize the phallic culture.
Devoid of any life of its own, patriarch feeds off those at hand, leaving a
broken and degraded world and a broken and degraded humanity. Men themselves are
reduced to a subhuman condition by their acceptance of and participation in such
a system. Yet it is women who bear the brunt of the rapist society's attack.

Patriarchy successfully continues to perpetuate its crimes
by cloaking its true intents and ends. It deceives its victims into accepting
its false claims of reality. "Patriarchy perpetuates its deception through
myth," and religions are often the most potent vehicles for the creation and
promulgation of such dehumanizing and necrophilic visions of reality. The
victims are mystified through myth, myths which they internalize and to which
they adhere. Women come to believe and even speak the fathers' lies, about
themselves and the world. They buy into the god-fathers' myths of salvation and
success. The god-fathers throw some crumbs of "power" and "success" to a few
tokens, be they blacks or other minorities, or especially women, to demonstrate
that their system is indeed "equitable," or at least capable of reformation.

The truth of the matter is, however, that intra
ecclesia non salus est. There is no possibility of redemption within or for
a system which is founded upon the degradation of the human species and its
environment. Through denial, tokenism, obfuscation and reversal, patriarchy
hides this fact. A chief organ in its propaganda campaign is a religion which
posits that God is male (and hence male must be God) and that only through
suffering in this life may one find true happiness in some world beyond. This is
the myth patriarchy projects onto the foreground of reality. It is the myth
which is internalized and is thereby self-perpetuating. Patriarchy traps its
victims in the semantic web of lies which constitutes the reality of the
Foreground, and obscures ultimate reality, which is the Background.

Women are therefore stuck in a seemingly untenable
position. Either they may seek suicidal security within the virtual reality of
the god-fathers, thereby defining their lives by degrading lies. This perverse
universe of meaning is all that they know, and therefore seemingly all they
could imagine. To leave it would be to confront no sense of self as defined by
patriarchy. This appears to women as the threat of Non-Being, of living in the
extra-patriarchal anomie. Or they may remain within the system, and thereby
retain a degraded sense of self. But to do so is to remain in a charnel house
which denies one full humanity. Again, one is confronted with the threat of
Non-Being, of a death of a thousand cuts. Trapped between this parasitic Scylla
and the anomic Charybdis, what's a girl to do?

The Fall and New Being

Daly's response to this question is drawn from Tillich.
Women must find the courage to be. This entails a new fall, a true fall, one not
into sin, but rather out of the degrading patriarchal system and into the
background. Only by doing so may they encounter New Being, which is their true
Being and their Old Being, obscured by patriarchal myths. It is a free-fall into
both an outer and an innerspace which is not defined by the god-fathers' lies.
Women themselves must become the bearers of New Being; they themselves must
become the incarnation of God.

Seen in this way, the awakening of women to our human
potentiality through creative action would be envisaged as having the
potentiality to bring about a manifestation of God which would be the second
appearance of God incarnate, fulfilling the latent promise in the original
revelation that male and female are made to the image of God (Daly 1985[1973],
73).

Only by taking a leap of faith into the seemingly anomic
void may women dis-cover their human potentiality. To do so is to reclaim their
primordial power, their gynergy, and to begin the process of re-membering and of
spinning new, gynocentric and biophilic realities. New Being is the dynamic and
creative power women discover in themselves, in their true humanity unveiled of
patriarchal myth. It is the healing power which re-members the self divided
against itself. It is manifest wheresoever women dare to speak, to reclaim their
human dignity and right to name, which is, to give meaning. It is a denial of
the myths that meaning-making is the Adamic task and that tasting the fruit of
the tree of knowledge is a sin. New Being is present when women curse the sins
of the fathers and laugh at their absurdity.

In affirming the centrality of the concepts of New Being
and the courage to be, Daly is clearly affirming the partial revelation of
Tillich's theological system. Yet Tillich himself was firmly entrenched in the
patriarchal system, a fact clearly attested by his penchant for sadist
pornography (Daly 1990[1978], 94-95). Tillich's vision of the savior must be
castrated for it to be truly salvific. Only by going beyond a conception of "God
the Father" may women find true wholeness and salvation in this life. Only by
realizing in their lives God the Verb will women participate in Be-ing.
God is the intransitive Verb, the creative and meaning-full force presently
incarnate in women's struggle for liberation. As intransitive Verb, God is not
objectifying, but rather dynamic. God summons women not to patient suffering in
expectation of riches to come, but empowers women in their humanity to make this
world rich. It is both a summons and power unto creation, celebration and
cerebration.

Spinning

The creative, celebratory and critical process is
Spinning. The term aptly captures the spiralling motion, the dizziness one might
feel engaged in such a process. It is a process which occurs on the boundaries
of patriarchal society, for Daly affirms that it is impossible to fully separate
oneself from that society. Yet Spinning issues forth into the void beyond,
creating new spaces, new galaxies and new times. Often, Daly's phrasing sounds
much like science fiction. She speaks of intergalactic and time travels, of
leaping from world to world, and of the menaces of necro-technology. In a sense,
this description is appropriate. From within the patriarchal system, these tales
are mere flights of fancy. But from the margins, looking out, it is the creation
and dis-covery/un-covering of new landscapes of being and meaning. It is the
existential and semantic construction of a reality beyond and below patriarchy,
the outward manifestation of gynergy, the fundamental power of women to be and
to construct meaning.

The creation of meaning occurs on the boundaries and
margins of patriarchal society, Unable to fully divest themselves of the old
boys' semantic network, Sisters and Spinsters are free to laugh out loud at
their ridiculous lies. Daly and her fellow Cronies re-member archaic meanings of
words and unlock their creative potential. They affirm themselves as Crones, the
Wild Women burned as Witches for their Wisdom. They proudly claim the title
Spinster as they weave new texts and a new fabric of reality from what threads
they may salvage from the torn tunic of phallic fallacy. Free to Be and to Name,
they place emphasis where they will, not respecting the capitalizations and
pomposity of androcentric verse.

Through the liberation of the powers of meaning present in
language, Daly and other Wild Women outwardly Spin a new space and time in which
to inhabit. In Spinning, they sew up the bonds of Sisterhood and support one
another in their ongoing Be-ing, thereby creating a sense of Be-Longing, both
with one another and with the universe. This Sisterhood is the vehicle of
women's' salvation, and indeed of cosmic renewal, for it extends to not only
human Sisters, but Mother Earth Herself. Together, they spin a complex web of
interconnected meaning which respects the wholeness and integrity of all within
that network. This spinning is also an internal process, for it binds up the
fragments of the divided self which has been shattered by patriarchy. It is both
the internal impetus to move forward into new galaxies of thought and life, as
well as the gyroscope which provides a sense of balance.

Daly's vision is therefore one of cosmic creation. It is
the rather Nietzschean construction of a world of meaning in light of limitless
possibility. Daly's is a realized eschatology, which sees in the women's
movement the collapse of patriarchal structures of destruction foretold. It sees
in this movement also the issuing forth of a restored humanity and cosmos, in
which God truly is present as the driving force of aesthetic creativity. It is
not only time now for the righteous anger of women scorned and scorched by the
god-fathers, but a time of true celebration, of reverie in the limitless life
now felt and made unfolding.

Epilogue/A Parthian Shot: Boys on the Side?

One key tension remains unresolved in Daly's analysis of
patriarchal oppression. Specifically, it is the function of men within
patriarchy. On the one hand, it is quite apparent that males enjoy the power
advantage within the system. Theirs is the place of pride, and theirs is the
image which hangs upon the cross deified. In Daly's classic catchphrase, "As
long as God is male, male is God." Yet, at the same time, Daly affirms that
patriarchy is destructive even for men. It imposes its own conceptions upon
them, and locks them into servitude of an oppressive system. They are robbed of
their essential vitality and humanity, and transformed into gynocidal robots.

The question arises as to whether men can be part of the
revolutionary movement of which Daly speaks. Philosophically, she affirms the
possibility. At various times she has held out hope for aspects of the so-called
"Men's Movement" which sought to erode traditional patriarchal roles. Yet in
practice, Daly excludes men from her classes and, where possible, her public
speaking engagements. Their presence is seen as detrimental, or at the very
least, unproductive. Thus, her appeal for an androgynous vision of renewed
humanity stands in polar tension with her own gynocentric emphasis. We must ask,
therefore, whither men?

Daly, Mary. 1994. Websters' first new intergalactic
wickedary of the English language / conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane
Caputi. Illustrations by Sudie Rakusin. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco.